Re: ARM clock API to PowerPC

[Mark Brown <broonie@sirena.org.uk>]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:28:43PM +0100, Russell King wrote:

> We used to pass names.  Everyone got the idea that they could ignore
> the struct device argument, and chaos ensued in drivers - people wanted
> to name each of their individual clk structures uniquely, and pass
> clock names, or even struct clk pointers into drivers via platform data.
> Some drivers conditionalized the clock name depending on the SoC they
> were built for in the driver code.

Yes, that sort of stuff is obviously crazy - you just end up with more
code to pass the name/pointer around than you have to register things at
init time.

> What I'm saying is that always passing a bunch of names has been well
> proven to lead people down the wrong path of matching only by names
> and then running into problems later.  We need drivers passing a NULL
> name to ensure that people get the right idea.  Comments in code/headers
> don't seem to work. ;(

I always suspected half the problem with people getting the wrong idea
is that having to implement the lookup and mapping stuff (which clkdev
now provides) seemed like too much work.